Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Debate between Lord Patten of Barnes and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Report stage
Wednesday 7th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten of Barnes (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of those observations. I speak at a university that is in receipt of an extraordinary stream of revenue from its academic press. I think it is true to say that it has the largest academic press in the world, which is hugely successful and is a very large international business. I am puzzled at the suggestion that the contracts it negotiates elsewhere are likely to have an effect on freedom of speech and the associated freedom of inquiry at the university itself.

One reason why the university press is covered is that it is part of the university—and it is part of the university precisely to stop that sort of thing happening. So I very much hope that we can have some clarity on this and get an assurance that there will not be any question of commercial fishing trips with university presses. It is incredibly important that they are allowed to go on firing on all cylinders and doing as well as they do at present. The Oxford University Press, for example, sells 2 million copies of the Oxford English/Chinese dictionary every year in China and has huge sales of academic books in Shanghai. Our China Centre has not been prevented from teaching people about what is happening in Xinjiang, Tibet or elsewhere. So I do think we need to be careful about how we address this issue and, at the very least, as the noble Baroness has just said, make it absolutely clear that fishing trips through FoI requests are out and that the Government would not seek to get involved in what could happen commercially unless there were some evidence that freedom of inquiry or speech had been compromised.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I hope that the Government will take this away, consider whether there is a way of adapting to some of the valid points made on these amendments and, if necessary, come back at Third Reading—when, I suspect, any further government amendments would be welcome.

I will briefly raise a question that I have already raised with the noble Baroness’s private office, which is how Clause 9 on overseas funding relates to a substantial clause of the National Security Bill, which had its Second Reading yesterday. It seems in some respects to overlap or possibly duplicate it. We have to be very careful about the potential to ask universities to supply further information, answer reports and weigh down their central administration. We already have the National Security and Investment Act, which lays down a number of obligations on universities, which they are fulfilling—justified but additional burdens. This Bill and the National Security Bill will potentially add a further layer of detailed reporting by universities to government, which I am not sure government will be entirely capable of handling. I wish to mark that before those two Bills pass: we should be very clear that they are compatible with and complement, rather than contradict, each other.

Having said that, the question of funding and student unions wants looking at. I was not aware that there is significant overseas funding for student unions. I suppose it is possible that the Chinese, Saudi or even Russian Governments could decide that covert funding of student unions would be a way to influence the British debate, so perhaps there is a half-justification for this. But these Benches, having talked to a number of student unions, are concerned about these small, underfunded bodies, which have a very rapid turnover of officers—as is their nature—having burdens placed on them that are heavier than they can cope with and are not justified by the situation. I mark that as a caveat and hope that the Government take it back for further consideration.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Patten of Barnes and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 26th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I will talk about two aspects of Horizon 2020. One is the question of certainty and the other is how this links with freedom of movement. I declare two interests. My wife has been on some of the advisory committees concerned with the definition of Horizon 2020 and what happens beyond it. British participation in defining research priorities across the European Union has been high in the last two or three exercises. That is not something that has been imposed on us and it is one of the things that we will lose.

My second interest is that I have a son who is a mathematical biologist and who spent his graduate and postgraduate years—up to 10 years—in the United States and came back to this country under an EU-funded scheme to bring bright young researchers back to Europe. He had his two-year Marie Curie fellowship and was advised not to apply for European Research Council fellowship, which would have naturally followed on, because we were perhaps leaving the European Union and that would make it difficult for him. The uncertainty is absolutely there. Happily, he now has another grant. He was persuaded to return to the University of Edinburgh by an Italian professor who led a multinational team there. That is how British universities work. I have been to many universities in other European countries where the overwhelming majority of staff and students come from that country or, in one or two countries such as Belgium and Spain, from that region. Those universities are not of the same quality or calibre.

I sometimes fear that there are hard Brexiteers in this country who think that we have too many foreigners in our universities already and that it would be much better if we went back to being proper British universities again, which would be much more in tune with the British national spirit.

As a mathematical biologist, my son is currently in Paris for six weeks at the Institut Pasteur, having spent some weeks last year in Heidelberg, because the sort of work you do in the life sciences is multinational and naturally collaborative. That requires easy movement, short term and long term. Anything which raises difficulties of travel in and out of this country, which is part of the intention of leaving the European Union, will make it much more difficult for our universities to go on being quite as good as they are. So I stress that, as we leave the European Union, we have to ensure that we remain internationally competitive and, in our universities, this matters.

Since the Government intend to leave the European Union in 13 months’ time, we need some rapid certainty on Horizon 2020. I suggest to the Minister that, well before the Bill leaves this House, the Government should have a clear answer, highly relevant to the Bill which takes us out of the European Union, on what the implications are of leaving and on which bits we are not leaving. Please may we have an answer?

[Lord Patten of Barnes (Con)]

My Lords, I will not only say that I will be brief but will be brief. I shall not pursue what has been said about Erasmus, with which I strongly agree—Erasmus must have been very grateful for all we have said about him today, although I think he would have some doubts about the present state of rationality in some of our political debate in this country.

I will instead follow the point made so well by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. I declare an interest, which is not financial. As the noble Lord will know, I was chancellor of a Russell group university in the north-east of England. I am chancellor today of another Russell group university. Perhaps just as significant, when I ceased to be a European Commissioner, I was asked to chair the committee which established the European Research Council. It did so on the basis of the recommendations in particular of Lord May, one of the greatest contributors to the debate about research and about universities in this country.

We established the research council on the basis that it would distribute funds by peer group review—not according to what individual countries had contributed but according to the research capacities of those countries and of particular institutions. And guess what? It demonstrated that we have the second-best higher education system in the world and arguably the best higher education system in Europe: we did extraordinarily well out of that research budget. As the noble Baroness pointed out, we get a great deal more back from the European budget than we put into it, which indicates how good our research community is in this country.

I realise that there are constraints under which the Minister has to operate—he has our sympathy and our prayers as he moves forward. I agree with what my noble friend Lord Deben said earlier: we do not expect him to do wonders. I am not sure that he will be able to tell us now what the Government’s intentions are in relation to the European research community. I do not blame him if he cannot do that, because I do not think that anybody in the Government has the faintest idea—certainly, I do not know anybody in Europe who has the faintest idea of what we want to happen—but I hope that, at the end of the day, as right reverend Prelates might put it, we will still be members of that research community.

So I do not expect the Minister today to be able to spell out precisely what arrangements we will have in the future—whether they will be similar to those which Switzerland has today, whereby it is part of the community but takes no management decisions about it. Israel is in a similar position. However, I hope that, even if he cannot tell us exactly what the relationship will be, he will at least give us one simple guarantee—and I am sure that the Chancellor of the Exchequer would want to stand over this very strongly.

When we leave the European Union we will lose the considerable surplus that we have at the moment in research spending—as I said, getting back more than we put in. Will the Minister guarantee this evening, even if he cannot give us any details about our future relationship with the European research community, that any shortfall in that funding after we leave the European Union will be made good by the Government?